Are Managers of Law Firms just Amateurs?

From Wikipedia: "A professional is a member of a vocation* founded upon specialised educational training". So what training have the managers in your firm had?

In a recent Harvard Business Review, Richard Barker - a professor at the Cambridge Judge Business School - wrote that "management is not a profession at all and can never be one".

Naturally enough, this caused quite a storm in management education circles prompting leading business journalist Stefan Stern to say in Professional Manager, the journal of the Chartered Management Institute, recently:

"By 'professional', most of us understand the idea of a relatively highly qualified person earning their keep by doing serious and worthwhile work. A professional has certain standards, codes and disciplines to live and work by. The opposite of a professional is an amateur: someone who likes doing what they are doing, but who remains fundamentally unserious about it".

He made the case for managers, who may be 'jack-of-all trades' but they should be master of one: management.

Again from Wikipedia: "An amateur (French amateur 'lover of', from Old French and ultimately from Latin armatorem nom, amator, 'lover') is generally considered a person attached to a particular pursuit, study or science...without formal training".

So there we have it. The 21st Century law firm is no place for the well-meaning amateur, the bumbling David Brent figure. Managers of all law firms should - no, must - embrace professionalism, if they are to get serious about what they do for a living every day.

Now, while management training might not be mandatory for you - beyond Management Course Stage One - the way we do it at 'dawlaw' is a dynamic way for you to start to build the hardest of skills - the soft skills - as a manager of lawyers.

So, want to survive and prosper?

* Again from Wikipedia: "A vocation, from the Latin vocare (verb, to call), is a term for an occupation to which a person is specifically drawn or for which they are suited, trained or qualified".

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